New 32-level Doom 2 wad on the way

There's a lot to choose from, but the worst offense of the screenshots you've posted is the enormous, flat, undetailed wall made of STARTAN2. Try out some other fun mapsets for visual inspiration, but always do what's fun to you regarding actual gameplay. Also keep in mind that it's better to receive negative feedback than none at all, and that if someone takes the time to criticize your work, you can use that to build better maps in the future. You'll definitely need to keep this in mind if you want to release mods for any game, not just Doom!

@Pedro VC -
I'm sorry the facts I stated were hard for you to cope with.

@Breezeep -
Because I want to, and I've been wanting to for over two decades now. RE: rest of this same thread.

@Doomkid

you said:

"but always do what's fun to you regarding actual gameplay."
that's exactly what I'm striving to do with these little test maps.

you also said:
"Also keep in mind that it's better to receive negative feedback than none at all, and that if someone takes the time to criticize your work, you can use that to build better maps in the future."

You're 100% completely correct. When the feedback, negative or positive is relevant, I'd approach it as if it were relevant.





Anyways,
I would love some constructive criticism in general..but even at this early stage I'm seeing that the strongest criticism is that I'm setting out to do too much at once, which I whole-heartedly disagree with..since I've broken down my approach and my process.... what on-topic criticism I've gotten I've appreciated.

Past that, I'm really just toying with really, really simple layouts and fundamental structures, at this point I just want to build a structure that's fun to play doom in. When I've gotten the layouts and physical parts worked out, I'll turn my attentions to texturing I PROMISE.

I've tried to explain that these maps I'm showing now are not meant, in anyway, to highlight texture use...or any kind of visual spark. They're meant purely to highlight different ways to demonstrate what works in a single player doom level and what doesn't work *purely* from a gameplay perspective.

I don't know how else to arrange those words to make their meaning jump any higher.

Anyway, negativity aside, I have a handful of these kinds of gameplay/flow/theoretical levels floating around in my head and on paper, and when I make them, I see geometry and deltas from revision to revision, not the textures.

The green structure shown in the screenshots was actually really enjoyable to battle against, and I think it's something I'll be sticking with...possibly as a reoccurring boss-structure type of thing. I'm not sure yet, I just know it was fun to dodge two kinds of rockets while having to be careful where I stepped.

I think the more of these kinds of structures I can develop, the more enjoyable the levels will be, at least in that one regard.

Now aren't you a salty person. :D

Considering you showed a bunch of screenshots of one rather simple structure/design idea, kind of shows that the chances for you to actually get through 32-level megawad are slim. That's why people are telling you, that it'd be best if you focused on something smaller. Getting even something small done is more fun and rewarding to you than planning a mega-project that most likely never sees the light of day. You really can't deny the fact, that you look like that typical guy with very ambitious plans for a megawad. The first post is mostly just talk and not actual concrete stuff to show what you've done and can do.

I'd suggest, you start working on refining your specifications for the whole megawad. Split it into "episodes" where each episode represents a new visual theme with some kind of gameplay theme too. Also, perhaps you could cut it down to 16 levels only? Give those 16 levels the content of 32 levels to keep the pack tighter in quality (loose is not fun).

Talk is probably fun and all, but actual content is what makes you awesome. Now get to it! :)

This thread is great. Please, continue. :D

@SotaPoika -

I know this has all the spatterings of those old Geocities pages that had their "under construction" gifs with two frames of animation - the one with the little road worker guy with the shovel. I certainly don't disagree that this looks a lot like that, I can see where people are coming from. It's a process though...I'm starting to wonder if I should make a flowchart. All I can say is...stay tuned, or don't, I'm not a cop.

@rdwpa -
Man, I'm tryin'.




I'd love to have more to show, but what I have are ideas. I'm trapped at work 10 hours a day so I can't sit in front of Doom Builder as much as I'd like, though I find time for it when other obligations aren't holding things up. Really digging into this right before Christmas wasn't a genius move on my part....but that hasn't stopped me in my tracks, and I've still produced a lot and figured out a lot in the search of what makes a really good single player doom map.

That's what I'd really like though...I want to hear from folks what it is they like most about the levels they've played that they've loved. What's fun about them? What makes them continuously exciting that you can play them over and over? What makes something the kind of map you use as the reference for a good map? I think that's the most valuable feedback I could ask for at this point because I want to build something around the concepts that are fun to people.

I'm taking a systematic approach to this and starting from the ground up, just about literally... I think in order for the level to be fun, the most basic parts of it should be fun first. I'm thinking about something as simple as a completely flat room...and how you could add walls to make it something at least mildly interesting to get lost in. Then, I want to look at the vertical space and see how I can make something more gripping out of what would otherwise be a really flat space. The ability to run up and behind something adds a lot to gameplay in the right circumstances. I'm searching for those circumstances.

Progress, one month later:

I've spent probably upwards of 60 hours doing sketches and working through ideas for different spaces. I have a lot planned for this, but each day I'm adding more or replacing what I had.
I'd post screenshots of them just to get some of the flavor of what I'm doing out there but they're practically engineering sketches and i've over-written each one several times with modifications so they just look like a mess of lines at this point.

I've been conducting my own tests with mapping to see what things impact flow and gameplay purely from the layout of the map (lots and LOTS of startan2 going on, sue me) and I've worked out some exciting things. It's amazing the change in feeling you get with even slight variations in floor height.

I'm finding it's hard to decorate large flat-ish walls, but maybe the answer to that is to un-flatten them.

For the most part, I've been able to do a lot with depth for craters and rubble, adding polygonal detail to something as simple as stairs goes a long way.

One thing I'll need to reference Doom 2 for is how they metered handing out weapons to the player. In the map I'm working on now, I think I'd be giving up too much too soon if I put a BFG in there, but at the same time if you want huge battles, you need the ammo to go with it...and there's only so many guns to choose from before trying to present them in a secret area like it's a gift to the player. This gets really repetitive and unnecessary a few levels in like "I already have a rocket launcher, why is this a secret?"

One of my favorite things between Descent 1 and Descent 2 was in 2, each weapon had a new alternate. Doom 2 only gave us a double barrel shotgun. It's hard to cook up a fresh experience for the player when there are fewer ingredients in the kitchen.

I'm trying to combat this by leaving out tons of ammo for the weapons meant to be used in certain areas in the hopes that ammo will be spent and the player will move on and pick up new ammo for a different weapon. Alternatively, if the player chooses to run for it, they can conserve ammo for a future fight but in a lot of what I have planned, players will have to cross the same paths multiple times, so thinking "do I murder everything now or later" becomes something you have to play with.

In the level I'm getting ready to post screenshots of, texturing has been done to calm the masses and I've added a lot of decorations, light posts, trees, etc.

Sometimes, all I do is add linedefs to structures to enhance detail. I'll go over the same wall multiple times to get the shape right or try and find what placement makes a room feel right....different monster placements....different healthpack allowances....There's a lot of drafting, making a small change, testing, then making a small change again..and the cycle continues...I'm deeply thankful there's no compile-time associated with this!

My goal coming up soon is to get elevators and doors working correctly. I have a couple of doors in so far - and they work - but the door's side textures don't unpeg so they slide around with the doors no matter what I do...a mystery for a later date.
The elevators are going to be important for ambiance, I recall a part of Doom 1 where elevators were used to make a rhythmic pumping/clicking sound which I want to make use of.

Other than all that, the best thing I can report is that playing the map I'm working on almost feels like I'm playing someone else's map...it's a weird thing to explain, but this is a *complete* departure from how I made quake 3 maps, all of which were done on a grid, relied entirely on symmetry and I actually developed a system for how I made stairs, they were exactly the same in each map, good for deathmatch, not so great for singleplayer. The overhead view of this map is so asymmetrical, it almost looks like a bunch of living cells. All of the doom maps I'm drafting are heavily fragmented sketches in a notebook, and you can actually feel it when you play them. There's very little systematic order to what's going on...which I think helps gameplay and especially exploration a lot.

tl;dr - I've done a bunch of work, I think it's coming along well and I'll post some screenshots soon

As promised, here are the screenshots. As mentioned, these areas don't do well with huge walls and original textures...but I'm working on it. This shows off maybe 10% of what I've done thus far just for the one level.

http://imgur.com/mHAJBmu
http://imgur.com/vLMdI9T
http://imgur.com/dRmklrP
http://imgur.com/u5KPplD
http://imgur.com/BS0kc9E
http://imgur.com/HSIZ0Yc
http://imgur.com/VDOtuPQ
http://imgur.com/kNAX0E6

Why would you take and post in a way that we have to click on each picture to show us 7 shots of the same area with list souls cluttering up the view to the point where I'm pretty sure that at least 4 of those were taken from the same vantage point, plus one undetailed room if that's only 10%?

Look, I feel where you're coming from with all the text and minus the attitude and all, but there have been some great mappers here giving some great advice that I think you should listen to. Most, if not all of us, have some secret megawad we want to finish some day, but starting off with small, standalone maps, or even contributions to a CP, are the way to go rather than trudging through 32 levels that most people won't play because the first few look like the screenshots you've posted. Please don't take this the wrong way, I was thinking the same thing as you the past 3 or 4 years, minus the time I've spent active here, but that wake up call was something I needed to get my priorities straight as far as attempting to create something actually solid rather than ignoring my own faults of under-detailing (now I can't create a room without thinking it looks like crap, what improvement! Lol). But seriously, make small, standalone maps that you will be okay with getting one or two responses for. Fight for as much feedback as you can get by releasing many individual maps because feedback can be generous, or fickle, here. It's easier to take that one comment on something small that you still learned from than something you spent 3 years on. Not like I've advanced very far myself, but I think that's a lesson that we all have to learn at first that some of these great mappers have have been trying (pretty nicely I might add) to tell you.

I hope this helps man; just keep at it and I'm sure your dream megawad can come to fruition one day.

I thoroughly enjoy that the first three shots are literally identical, except for monster movement.

Just a little advice, you can prevent the sprites from looking so flat - In display options>openGL options>preferences, set 'sprite billboard' to x/y axis and set 'sprite clipping' to 'smart' or 'always', depending on what you think looks better. This prevents the sprites from looking like cardboard when you look down, it displays similarly to software mode.

I thought it'd be helpful to get a sense of the depth to have slight changes in the angle of the screenshots, but I think I'm starting to see the trend.

Mea culpa on the monsters though, but I wanted to show what it's like in-play. Like I said, some walls are large and the textures don't scale well so if I'd shown it without the monsters, you'd just see huge dark walls. Very much a work in-progress.

I tried to get it to post differently so the images came up in-thread...but it wouldn't work, I'm not sure why. It worked once before but ..I don't know.

@Doomkid -
This is another plague of doing large scale maps is the sprite billboarding you describe. I actually tried the thing you suggested a while back and it looked off to me, but I'll try it again. Thanks, man. Also Cutthroat was pretty cool - I finally worked my way through it, I especially liked the parts where you could antagonize monsters 3 rooms away through windows.

@Fonze -

I really, really hear you and I get where you're coming from and I respect your perspective. I might not have made myself clear though....I won't rush this to get it out to make a point, I'll only put it out there if it really seems like it holds up to other great wads. If I end up producing junk, I'll remove the junk.

Come to think of it, if I used ALL of the content I've drafted so far, I'd already be done...I'd have 32, largely unplayable, horrible maps. :) That's not what I want to do though, I'm putting everything under a microscope and testing it to death.

I've already found like...a hundred things that don't work well or don't flow, they've all been scrapped and the process behind how I design things is altered accordingly. I kinda regret posting the screenshots now because I'm not as ready as I'd like to be to get unadulterated, unabridged full-gameplay-experience feedback (here, specifically)...because it's not there yet and I see that's what folks here crave. I have walls the size of warehouses covered in "brownhug" because it's slightly less visually jarring than repetitive metal textures. The best way to fix this is....as far as I can see, is to add in something that adds depth to an otherwise large flat surface, but that takes time..and I didn't put in enough yet.

I can promise you this though, every single day I'm adding to this project in one way or another because I want to make something people will actually enjoy playing...and I really think I have a lot of the gameplay dynamics set, the "formula" seems to have been worked out in general, though that gets tweaked as I move on.

When it comes to releasing fully polished, individual maps I'd want to use in this WAD though, that's something I'm simply not interested in doing. I see why other people do it, I see the potential advantages, but in my own case, I think play testing behind the scenes is sufficient for what I'm doing. I'm still getting gameplay feedback, which is what I assume the goal of your intentions are - I'm just getting it somewhere else, in a different way.

That being said....I don't know what else I can add here that doesn't conflict with my objectives. Thanks to those that provided useful feedback (there were a bunch of you, you know who you are)

Imgur allows multiple ways to link images. You need to copy+paste the direct link rather than the straight-up url. You can tell the difference because the direct link starts with "i." before imgur.com and ends the rreal file extension. Here's an example http:\\i.imgur.com\xxxxxxxx.jpg

Note that you can change the picture's size by adding in a letter right before the ".file extension" such as an "l" for large.

Use the [img] tag to surround the link rather than the [url] tag.

You said you're getting gameplay feedback elsewhere, that's cool and all, but I haven't read a single bit of gameplay feedback here except from people saying they wouldn't play it. It's the aesthetics of it. There's been a ton of comments here, from you too no less, saying that the massively mono-textured walls don't look right. I think all the advice here boils down to how the Look of it affects the gameplay, or more-so, a player's perception of it. No offense to your buds from the other forums, but if they're not specifically Doom forums you're getting bad advice.

Definitely add depth to the massively mono-textured walls. Put in rocks and shit coming up from the floor/down from the ceiling to give some interest to things. Add in a couple random supports that make no sense because even that's better that a MMT'd wall.

But you don't have to release these all individually if you don't want go; if that's the case, put this project on the back burner until you learn a few more things. Play other's PWADs and don't just use the IWADs as your guide, unless you're specifically mapping for vanilla, but even then youd be better served to study what the great mappers this site has to offer do to make their stuff look interesting, like there's something behind each corner that you just want to see.

Adding depth to monotextured walls -- which basically translates to "not making them monotextured anymore in a neat and coherent way" -- is not so hard. Study good modern pwads (Cacoward winners) and you'll be able to write a How To essay on it.

Thanks for the info on the imgur links...I thought I tried that, I might try and fix them again.

There is no gameplay feedback here, you are correct. I'm not getting advice on the textures because I personally don't really care about them *so* much just yet. I tried to explain earlier in the thread that I was focused on developing the flow of each map from a purely physical stand-point...but the points been lost of the fray of comments on textures.

My original intention was to build test maps that helped me feel the physics of the game...things like "how does a battle with a chaingun feel against a pain elemental in a small space vs a large one"....or...."how does being on top of a cliff firing down at enemies work when you need to run around a lot". I posted some screenshots of these, featuring the disclaimer that textures don't matter yet, what I'm working on is only a physical thing and the textures would come later. I hoped this would spur discussion of the shapes and sizes of good doom levels. Naturally, people jumped up my butt about textures so I just kept doing my experiments in private offline.

While no one came out and said it directly(except where you just touched on it in your reply), it made me wonder how much the textures ARE a part of that visceral doom gameplay experience...and I think to a limited extent, they may be a bit, but nothing impacts as much as the layout itself, so that's where I'm focusing my primary efforts. Doom, being what it is, generally has the player in fight-or-flight mode.

I think it could almost be linear enough to be organized on a slider. All the way on one side, you have dark moody graphics where you try to impart a sense of dread on the player with lots of pentagrams and fire and scary shit. On the other end of the spectrum, you have spaces where your only focus is running and gunning. If you're just blasting away with rockets, you're not really drinking in the beautifully sculpted demon skull on the wall. I suspect in these fast-paced cases, the fancy artwork is nice, but less appreciated due to the circumstance.

There was a good hunk of doom 1 where you just had long hallways of that green marble texture, once in a while you'd see a little green podium with a beating heart on it. That was sufficient atmosphere when I was a kid, and that's not really a far cry from what I'm going for in terms of mood - for the most part.

I did a lot of good development in my "startan2" test worlds and a lot of those tests yielded really good ideas for the levels I'm working on. Even though they look like garbage, they're actually fun to be in. I'm spending more time now with aesthetics ...really just so I could post a screenshot or two without getting fire-bombed, but it's clearly still not enough - which I openly admit and have said it's very much a work in progress.

I liked this thought:

"like there's something behind each corner that you just want to see."

I think "each corner" is ambitious, but I like where your heads at, though I'm not sure how practical it is. The screenshots don't show it, but I've incorporated a LOT of what people ended up pointing out in their comments. When I think back on WADs that I love...and still play..and new ones I come across, like Swift Death (boy, what a clusterfuck of difficulty that is, but I love it) I don't ever recall being bowled over visually by anything in them...and I've been playing doom since 1996 so it's not like I started out with Crysis or something. Doom to me has just always been about running and gunning, while some parts of doom 1 pulled off atmosphere really well which is a nice bit of nostalgia...that atmosphere isn't what kept me coming back all these years. Maybe I'm the odd-guy out, but I go back to doom time and time again so I can play an unencumbered, classic FPS without all the annoying bells and whistles of modern FPS games, Doom 3 included.

At the end of it all, I want to make something with landmarks...things people will see that will help guide them through the game, but when they've beaten it, they'll also remember some unique things that were done just in this wad....but not to the point it detracts from the fine-tuning of more prevalent gameplay aspects.

As far putting this on the back burner goes....I think I'm already doing what you're talking about. I played Doomkid's Cutthroat map, and I've been playing other wads, like the Swift Death one I mentioned and a bunch of others to get a sense of what people have been able to get away with. I agree with you things should look interesting, where I'm spending a lot of time now is making things look interesting without breaking other parts of the maps.

@rdwpa -

That's essentially what I'm doing. In between multi-hour fits of mapping, I'll take time out to try out someone else's work.